[VIDEO] President Jimmy Carter Was a Fan of Sebring Raceway and Corvettes

Former President Jimmy Carter could not tell a lie.

During an interview with imsa.com, the former president talked about his love for racing, even telling a story about how he broke the speed limit in a Corvette one time as a passenger.

“My youngest son (Jeff) has a brand new Corvette,” he told imsa.com, “and I’ve been out in it. I won’t tell you how fast we went!”

Pausing to laugh heartily, Carter continued: “I don’t want to confess breaking the speed limit, but we broke the speed limit, I’ll have to admit it.”

The 39th president, who passed away at age 100 on Sunday afternoon, was a race fan his whole life, even working as a ticket vendor at NASCAR races at Atlanta Motor Speedway before he became governor of Georgia. Once he was elected to the state’s highest office, Carter even hosted race car drivers at the Governor’s Mansion in Atlanta.

Carter also was a big fan of Sebring races.

“As soon as I came home from the Navy, Rosa and I and the children began to drive down to Sebring and went to the 12-Hour race there, which was always interesting,” Carter said.

He recalled how he and his wife Rosalynn learned to tell the race cars apart just by the sounds of their engines.

“They used to sell 33-rpm records of the different sounds of every race car at Sebring, and my wife and I used to listen to them and we would try to turn the other way and see which kind of car was coming.”

Some of the Maseratis and others had eight cylinders, Carter said. “Some of them had 12 cylinders – the Ferraris, I believe, had 12 cylinders. They sounded like a sewing machine, very smooth.”

But it was the legendary American sports car, the Corvette, that really won his heart.

“I really kind of fell in love with the Chevrolet Corvette,” he said. “Corvettes kind of sounded like a John Deere tractor compared to (the Ferraris), but they would hold their own in speed. So it was a time of origination of a real car that could compete internationally.”

From IMSA Official via YouTube:

President Jimmy Carter recently reflected on his experiences at the Mobil 1 Twelve Hours of Sebring – which became an annual tradition for the Carter family. He talks about the sounds of the various cars – and the one that became a personal favorite.

Source:
autoweek.com

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